Quantum Magic
by The Skeptical Puck
Summary: A father passes on his legend to his child
1. Prologue

AN: Hello all. I'd abandoned writing at university but now I'm done I've begun to yearn for it. This has manifested itself in a number of ways, including a couple of blog entries (I really must update) and a few ideas knocking around in my head rather insistently demanding that they be written. This particular story bothered me until it emerged near fully fledged, for the first time ever I have a story planned from beginning to end. I intend it to be about 8 chapters, no more than around 5,000 words, and have the second chapter written and have started work on the third.

If I get a positive reaction, I hope to be finished by the end of July. But any readers I still have (it has been a long time, hasn't it) may remember i am not known for finishing stories. Well, this will be an experiment in discipline I suppose.

**Chapter 1: Prologue**

My Darling Daughter.

You are seventeen, an adult now, in law and magic, and I could not be more proud of you. It seems just yesterday that I first held you, minutes after you came into the world, and gave the blessings of good health and happiness. I looked into those green eyes we share and I loved you instantly, a love that has grown endlessly ever since.

When you were young I could not bear to let you out of my sight. The war had been done only 5 years previously; my enemies, well those that still lived, could hold a long grudge, and I feared for your safety. But more than that, I did not want to miss a moment of your growing up. I wanted to see you walk for the first time, hear your first words, be with you every step of the way as you learned to explore the world around you. I wanted to give you everything, except that one thing you truly wanted.

You learned early on of my fame, though I tried to shield you from it. You handled being my child wonderfully, all my children have, with a humility and grace you must have inherited from your mother. But it also exposed you to the legends of my magic. The spells I wrought in my earliest years to defend myself from any curse, to walk through any protection, and curses that tore through any shield to steal the breath from my enemies' lungs.

They are all, regrettably, true.

As a child you saw it as your birthright, your legacy, and felt angry when your peers learned their family magics but I refused. You at first thought that it was because I would pass it to my son, but your younger brothers have not learned it either. Your mother has taught you secrets of arts so arcane they are lost to time, and I have made sure all you kids were armed with every dirty trick that would keep you alive. By your fourth years of Hogwarts most aurors would have struggled against you. You absorbed knowledge like a sponge, so like your mother, but I would not teach you more than that.

When I named you my heir on your last birthday, and brought you before the Wizengamot, I wonder if you thought I might give you them then, or whether you had given up by that point. I did consider it, but I still wished to hold on.

If you felt slighted or unworthy for my continued refusal I apologize, that was never the intent. I wanted to protect you, and myself. For what I offer you is a bloody legacy indeed, a terrible power. I had wanted to spare you from it, and selfishly, I feared I would lose your love if you knew of my actions during the war. You are so pure, so perfect, it seemed evil to tell you off the darkest moments of those days. I thought it best that my discoveries die with me, but recent stirrings in the east has convinced me that my powers should remain in the family line, for the time when they may be called on again.

My secret is I suppose a relatively simple one, truth be told. At Hogwarts the theory of magic is drummed into you early and often, and at its heart is one simple message.

"Casting Magic is performing the impossible."

It's a good rule, and makes sense. There is so much magic can perform that is entirely outside what we define as our reality.

It's also entirely wrong. It should be obvious. We spent seven years learning rules that are a paradox when taken with that central tenet. For if magic should do the impossible, then why should it not break it's own rules? That one rule has kept magic shackled to the unimpressive limits of Wizarding imagination.

It is true enough that when confronted with supposed infinite possibilities, humanity is not very good at imagining beyond their immediate needs.

The truth I discovered is that magic is tied as directly to the laws of physics as you or I, it cannot do the impossible.

It's just that wizards have a very limited knowledge of what is possible...

I shall tell you how I came to discover and utilize my spells during the years before and during the second war. Then you can choose whether you still wish to learn them.

It all started with a roll of the dice.

AN: As always, I wait in a fervor of desperate anticipation for reviews. I CRAVE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.


	2. Alea iacta est

AN: As I got a review I'm updating with the second chapter. If I get a few more, will look to the third being done Sunday evening.

**Alea iacta est. **

One six.

Five to one against. I added a die and rolled again.

Two sixes.

Thirty-five to one against, it appeared to be working. I added another and rerolled.

Three sixes.

Two hundred and fifteen to one against. I allowed myself a grin, but it was not over yet. I added yet another die and rolled again.

Four sixes.

I pause to calculate, one thousand two hundred and ninety-five to one against. The triumph was near. I added the final die and rolled them all.

Five sixes.

Yahtzee.

Seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-five to one against. Combined, fifteen consecutive sixes borders on fifty billion to one, nearly four thousand times more improbable than winning the lottery

Emboldened, I cast them again.

Five sixes.

Another Yahtzee.

Total improbability reaching nearly 4 quadrillion to one. The whole world's population rolling twenty dice a minute would expect to achieve the same result in two years. Suffice it to say, it was a unique event, made possible by magic.

I was sitting in my room in the Leaky Cauldron, during the summer before my third year (when I blew up my aunt, a bedtime story you never tired of), practising probability spells I'd found in a sixteenth century treatise. The book itself was a curious old tome I'd picked up in an antiquarian bookstore that I used to buy your mother's birthday and Christmas presents in.

To clarify I had very little interest in the spell itself. At thirteen years old gambling spells offered me little save for chocolate frogs won over exploding snap. No it wasn't the spells that interested me, it was that they were cast without a wand. They were considered by the author of a sixteenth to be the most effective gateway to wandless magic, despite their questionable legality.

Later research by your mum would find they had been banned sometime in the fifteenth century, along with games of chance, and the ministry had proceeded on a singularly effective drive to eradicate all knowledge of them entirely.

Though it was not anything the Ministry did that meant it proved effective, then it was just as inept, but as the Old Families of the Wizengamot cared only for a flutter on Quidditch, not such lower-class pursuits, so they never sought to preserve the knowledge as they did so many of the banned arts before then. That, combined with a growing attitude that wandless magic was an impressive, but ineffective parlour trick meant that within a few generations the knowledge was entirely eradicated. Mine was likely the only instructional text that remained.

I was unaware at the time how important these spells would become, seeing them only as a sign that I was ready to translate my favourite spells to wandless use. I imagined with great relish the thought of untraceably jinxing Malfoy, or the look of shock on his face as I blocked his spells with just my hand. I had such small ambitions then. That I had unearthed spells lost for centuries was irrelevant compared to the weight of schoolyard rivalry.

It would be another year before I realised the potential of those spells. Potential that would see me marked a hero, and branded a monster.


End file.
